Thursday, July 19, 2012

Law and mathematics both developed under the steely eye of
the definition. History and literature developed behind definition’s back,
which is why both have a ludicrous bent. To understand the power and essence of
definition, one must free oneself from its seeming inevitability – one must
slip out from literature and history, rather than approach it from law and
mathematics.

Of course, once upon a time, definition was not such a
power. The idea that norms or numbers form a system, and that the system is coherent
and consistent, and that coherence and consistency are systematic – these
ideas, granted, were in the air, but they weren’t taken for granted. This is
not to tell the familiar story of the dreamtime of the folk – it is, rather,
that what a definition is, and why it should have such power, had not yet been
systematically developed. Which is to say that the system as a concept had,
itself, not been systematically developed. There was the moon, stars, tides and
the sun – that is, there was the cosmos – and there were the demons, heroes,
gods, and spirits – there was theology – and, retrospectively, we can see these
as systems. But – to put it in Hegelspeech – the system hadn’t thought of
itself yet.

Once upon a time is the pre-historical category of historical
time, and might be defined by… its lack of definition. Once upon a time does,
however, emerge in history. Although it has the curious property of only being
recognized retroactively – it is like the landscape that is revealed through
the backwindow of a moving car, which, however much we know that it is equal to
the landscape revealed through the frontwindow of the car just a moment ago,
bears the total impression of being behind us – a gestalt-switched twin.

To take a random instance, take IP rights. IP rights bet
everything on definition. But this, up until very recently, wasn’t so.
Takethis from Sherman and Bentley’s
The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law: the British Experience,
1760-1911:

“One of the most important points of contrast
between modern and pre-modern law is in terms of the way the law is organised.
While today the shape of the law is almost universally taken as a given ± the
general category of intellectual property law being divided into subsidiary
categories of patents, designs, trade marks, copyright and related rights ±
under pre-modern law there was no clear consensus as to how the law ought to be
arranged: no one way of thinking had yet come to dominate as the mode of
organisation. Rather, there was a range of competing and, to our modern eyes,
alien forms of organisation. It is also clear that, at least up until the
1850s, there was no law of copyright, patents, designs or trade marks, and
certainly no intellectual property law. At best there was agreement that the
law recognised and granted property rights in mental labour, although the
nature of this legal category itself was uncertain.”

Mental
labor, Sherman and Bentley claim, were treated in modern law the way the old
behavioralists treated ideas and mental events: as irritants and illusions,
having nothing to do with the case. Clearing your mind of mental labor, you go
forward from once upon a time and into the clear light of definitions that are
appropriate for corporate enterprises, or the modern laboratory, or the studio,
or private public collaborations, etc. – all the heavy tinsel of business and
policy speak.

I
mention this to underline the fact that though it may seem quaint to want to
actually examine the philosophical validity of definitions, quaintness can give
way to urgency if the police are at your door and you are accused of providing
links to pirates. It is at that moment that the average schmuck gets a full
glimpse of the armed power of the definition.

And
yet – still, I ask you, what is it? A genre? Is a definition like a poem or an
aphorism or a novel? A piece of language thinking of itself, a piece of
floating meta bumping into our everyday routines? Even asking what it is seems
to bring it up (its shadow swelling ominously) behind me. Is it a god, a demon,
or … after all … a human being?

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

The waste books (there’s a Russian word for this, the
“fallen leaves’ genre,- Opavshelistika
-- seem to leave behind some anachronistic, animal trail in the modern system
of literature. That system connects the media and the university in a total
environment of writing that conditions the very notion of the “writer”: he’s a
journalist, a pundit, a poet, a novelist. In the twentieth century, the
writer’s most important work is to produce texts that can be taken up by the
cinema, or by television. The writer in the press produces opinions. Literature
informs the conversation in the press and the classroom, and prefers its
readers to be in the classroom or as members of a bookclub. It prefers, above
all, to see literature as a social function – from this point of view, solitude
is unmasked as bourgeois mystification, or as a psychological aberration.

This system has a place for the aliens of literature who
write the Opavshelistika, but it is in the nature of the
system that taking them seriously means metamorphosing them, curing them of the
solitude in which they are bathed. It is the curethat the waste book writers fear, or devise means to avoid. These
aliens take marginality and solitude as the conditions of the vocation of
writing – and insofar as these are the byproducts of failure (a failure to
market, to circulate, and to achieve the regard that comes with good business),
the waste book writers tend to will failure, to desire it as a sacred thing,
valuable in itself. It is by the crack in the golden bowl, the phrase that
doesn’t reach its end – it is by indirection, evocation, and the proper
appreciation of fortuna in the very production of writing that one reverses the
system’sunbearably invasive presence.

It is from the point of view of the will to failure that
Vasilli Rozanov, in Fallen Leaves, issues his condemnation of writing: “In my
opinion, the essence of literature is false: I don’t mean that the litterateurs
or, again, the ‘present times’ are bad, but instead the entire domain of their
action, and that “all the way to the root.” [my translation from the French]

Rozanov takes up a theme that feeds into the literary
guerilla’s rejection of the system, and its paradoxes. It is a theme that is
tonally always on a foray; however, these forays have a certain midnight air.
It is a theme that lends itself to incendiary grafitti. Yet, its producer, in
the morning, wakes up to the fact that he or she is still a writer. The waste
book, the marginal note, the rejection of literature, is also published, also
circulates, also provides us with a domain of study and of reference. Its
communicative content, however true, is falsified by its communicative form,
its necessary alliance with the system it rejects.

Why this “I” and why this ‘they’ll read me”? It really means
“I am more intelligent than the others”, “the others are worth lessthan me.” It is a sin.”

In one of his letters, Van Gogh expresses the thought that
Jesus did not mean for his words to be written down, and would have been horrified
at the tradition of Christian literature. In a sense, the Gospel is founded on
a radical lack of faith – the writing signals that the apocalypse is
indefinitely deferred. The charismatic moment is lost as soon as it is finds a
medium – this is its melancholy, this is the contradiction that charisma
sublimates.Rozanov was of course
attracted to the apocalyptic moment, and he toyed with the vatic function of
the writer, all the way to the point of marrying his first wife, Appollinaria
Suslova, apparently on the strength of the fact that she had been involved in
that sado-masochistic relationship with Dostoevsky that the latter transposed
to the Gambler. His own vatic denunciations – of Jews, of Communists, finally
of Christ – are violent and, at the same time, never definite, never part of a
set code.

Interestingly, Rozanov was well aware that it was the, as it
were, material conditions of the written that defined the cultural system of
writing that he detested:

“What is new [ Rozanov is writing about his text, Solitaria]
is the tone, once again that of pre-Gutenberg manuscripts. In the Middle Ages,
one didn’t write for the public because, reasonably enough, the printing press
didn’t exist. And the literature of the middle ages are under many aspects
beautiful, strong, touching and deeply beneficent in its discretion. The new
literature has been up to a certain point victimof its excessive manifestation: after the invention of the
printing press, no one in general was capable of that, and no one, moreover,
had the courage to defeat Gutenberg.”

Rozanov himself, according to George Nivat, issued his books
in limited numbers, and he tried very much, in the Fallen leaves, to press the
occasion against the written – where it was written, what needed to be erased,
etc. At the same time, he wrote for the press – he wrote enormously for the
press. And from this perspective it is not so much Gutenberg but the great
yoking together of the press and the steam engine that his writing set out to
defeat, a cosmological struggle against the monologing super-ego.

“My real isolation, almost mysterious, made me capable of
doing it [defeating Gutenberg]. Strakhov said to me “Have the reader always
present in your mind, and write in such a way that everything be clear for
him.” But however much I try to imagine him, I never succeed. I could never
represent to myself the face of a reader, the approbation of a brain, and I
always wrote alone, essentially for myself. Even when I wrote to please, it was
as if I was throwing something over a precipice, making “a great laugh flash
out of the depths”, when there was nobody around me. I always liked to write my
“editorials” in the waiting room of journals, in the midst of visitors, their
discussions with the writers, in the coming and going, the noise, and me
planted there hatching an article “a propos of the last speech in the Duma”. Or
even in the hall of the editorialboard. One time I had to say to my collaborators, sirs, a little quiet
please, I’m writing a reactionary article (gestures, laughs, commentaries). The
hilarity was at its peak. Understanding nothing, just as before.”

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

He
didn’t know that it was a Santa Fe sky, say the sky of June 3, 1993,
same lowslung clouds, same flat earth, same encircling hills, same high
blue sky above the clouds, that he was seeing in that summer of 1888,
when he was bothered by the mistral and the rent and the need to
suppress his sexual instincts – the year he lived on half cooked
chickpeas and cheap alcohol – because Van Gogh never set eyes on New
Mexico. I however recognized it instantly, hanging there in the distance
outside the bus window as we swept by the acres of sun flowers and made
the turn into Arles from Tarascon, where we’d go off the train.

Arles it turns out was not the tourist mecca A. and I feared it might
be – seems they had all oiled off to the festival in Avignon – and we
settled in for our jaunt nicely after a small blowup at our hotel --
they tried to palm off a room to us that was deficient in the usual room
things – handles on doors, lampshades, and size, with the bathroom
competing with the bedroom in volume, which was not doing a favor to
either party. We achieved a more brilliant room, then we hied it to the
Place de Forum for lunch. I suggested to A, a little shamefacedly, that
we eat at the restaurant that claims to be the restaurant Van Gogh
painted at night (supposedly ornamenting his huge Cargmanole peasant hat
with little candles so he could see his canvas). Replete with poulpe
and nicoise salade, we then commenced a tour of Arles medievale, and the
river. Arles, like Santa Fe, hosts a lotta art in the summer –
everybody’s favorite stalker, Sophie Calle, had just been in town for an
expo – and it made a nice contrast between the old town’s winding,
narrow street, which crooked along like a map of the blind leading the
blind, and the affiches for past or present attractions which were glued
up all over the pressing walls. The weather was perfect Provence, the
kind that brings in flocks of retired British couples. They’d sneak up
behind us as we would read the carte outside of restaurants: Mum, ‘ere
it says they serve hommelette and frites! I wanted to try the taureau –
Arles is right proud of the running of its bulls, and has run them
through its cuisine as well, with local sauces and cuts. I liked it,
but, such is my feebleness and American decadence, I liked A.’s
entrecote de boeuf even more. The next day we used the ticket we’d
bought to gain entrance to all the sights on the ancien stuff – starting
with Allychamps, Champs Elysees, the street of sarcophagi, then on to
the Arene and the Thermes. A. said Arles was practically Italian. Bought
a book at Actes Sud, the bookstore/publisher, which has set up a
general emporium of culture (coffeehouse, exhibition place, cinema).
Then we lounged fashionably in a few squares, consuming beer, Perrier,
some green syrupy thing, a mystery novel, emails, and time – until we
had to move it to the railroad station and take the express train back
to Montpellier. We were sunburned, well fed, and pretty happy about our
one day jaunt/anniversary celebration. Van Gogh, of course, left
Arles under less happy circumstances. After the unfortunate ear act and
the shutting up in the hospital, fifty Arles citizens signed a petition
to the mayor to have him expelled, which depressed him a lot. Reading
his letters, it is easy to see what an impossible man he was, messianic
in that D.H. Lawrence manner – but I have a huge weakness for the
wrestlers with the chthonic soul, the underground men, those who fizz
like some malfactured cherry bomb, refusing either to explode or sputter
out, and thus dangerous to approach. If only, for his sake, he had sold
a few paintings in his lifetime! If only, for our sake, he had sold a
few less paintings, or at least for less money, in his afterlife! Those
guys at the fin de siecle counted a lot on the Nachwelt – on the future.
They staked their work on posthumous fame. But, as Karl Kraus once
wrote, do we, the living, really deserve to be a posterity? Kraus
doubted we were up to the task. I do too.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.